HISTORICAL AUTHORS’ HALL OF FAME

Looking for an engrossing historical fiction read? gr has rounded-up eight of the best for you to try.

The books in Diana Gabaldon’s ‘Outlander’ series have undergone a renaissance recently after being adapted into a BBC TV series that has gained a cult following. When Claire Randall is thrown back in time from 1945 to 1743 she finds herself in a very different Scotland, where she is branded as an outlander or Sassenach (a derogatory word for an English person) in a country run by clans and invaded by Redcoats. Try this series if you like a well-researched historical sagas that have swashbuckling adventure and a bit of romantic romping.

Philippa Gregory, the doyenne of UK historical novelists, focuses primarily on the Tudor period, but she has also published a series of books about the Plantagenets, who preceded the Tudor dynasty. Her latest book, Three Sisters, Three Queens, focuses on the Spanish-born Katherine of Aragon, who is brought to the Tudor court of HenryVIII as a young bride, where she becomes ensnared in treacherous power plays Few readers would not know the name of Georgette Heyer (1902–1974). One of last century’s most prolific writers, Heyer wrote

Regency romances, a genre she virtually established and made her own. The Regency period spanned the years from 1811 to 1820, and Heyer would write with an 18th-century quill pen in an attempt to immerse herself in the era. Rumours circulated that another writer, Barbara Cartland, had been copying her characters and styles, which made Heyer furious. She called Cartland ‘my principal plagiarist’.

Stephanie Laurens, another popular regency romance author, was born in Sri Lanka. Since the age of five, however, Laurens has lived in Australia. With a PhD in biochemistry, Laurens worked in cancer research for many years. Realising one day that she was having trouble finding a good historical romance read, she decided to write her own. She is now one of the world’s bestselling authors in the genre, making it to number one on The New York Times bestseller list.

Patrick O’Brian is best known for his ‘Aubrey–Maturin’ series. The books are set in the British Royal Navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and they focus on the friendship of English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the doctor Stephen Maturin. The series comes to a total of 20 books, the first of which, Master and Commander, was made into a film starring Russell Crowe. Having survived the test of time since the first book in the series was published in 1969, this series is highly recommended.

Bernard Cornwell is best known for his ‘Sharpe’ series, set during the Napoleonic Wars and featuring rifleman Richard Sharpe. Cornwell has written another four series worth reading:‘The Warlord Chronicles’ set in Arthurian Britain; the ‘Grail Quest’ novels set in the mid-14th-century during the Hundred Years’ War; ‘The Saxon Stories’, which transports readers to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex during the 9th-century reign of Alfred the Great, and ‘The Starbuck Chronicles’, which take us across the Atlantic to the American Civil War.

Tom Keneally, an Australian Living Treasure, won the 1982 Man Booker Prize for his novel Schindler’s Ark. In a fortuitous meeting in a Los Angeles shop in 1980, Keneally met Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor and the owner of the shop. Upon learning that Keneally was a writer, Pfefferberg told the Australian about German industrialist Oskar Schindler and showed him the information he had gathered. The rest was history in more ways than one. Three other Keneally novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, including The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

Hilary Mantel, already well known as a writer and film critic for The Spectator, was catapulted to international fame when she won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 for the first novel in her ‘Thomas Cromwell’ trilogy, Wolf Hall. This book tells the tale of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. The second book in the trilogy, Bring up the Bodies, also went on to win the Booker Prize; Mantel is the only woman to win the award twice.